In 1925, the 19-year-old artist Rex Whistler met the
52-year-old Edith Olivier at a house party in Italy. Within hours, they were
arguing spiritedly about the nature of power. Within days, Whistler had
persuaded Edith to shingle her hair and raise her skirts, embarking on a new
life as a Bright Young Person. Within weeks, this unlikely friendship had
become the central relationship in both their lives, as it would remain for the
next 20 years.

Almost immediately, they transformed each other. Whistler
was a diffident, chiselled beauty, a dazzling draftsman whose Arcadian scenes
were at odds with the artistic climate of his time. Although he had started to
move in aristocratic circles (he met Olivier through the decadent young peer
Stephen Tennant), he was awkwardly aware that his father was a builder. Olivier
encouraged his romantic vision and introduced him into society, finding him a
patron to pay the rent of a London studio.

Olivier was an energetic and original woman whose autocratic
father had prevented her from straying far beyond the family home. In her 20s,
she had briefly acquired independence by studying at Oxford. During the first
world war, she had almost inadvertently established the Women’s Land Army. But
it was only now, bereft of both father and sister, that she could realise her
talents. Encouraged by Whistler, she began to write dark, fantastical stories
set in the Wiltshire countryside she loved. Her first novel, published in 1927,
was an immediate success.

Anna Thomasson uses their friendship to tell their life
stories, following them both until their deaths in the 1940s. This doesn’t
sound immediately promising; before reading the book, it’s hard to see how a
celibate 20-year friendship could sustain our interest over the course of so
many pages. But it’s a relationship that provides a window on to a fascinating
world, and the story is narrated with elegant verve.

Part of the interest lies in the enticing cast that quickly
gathers in and around Daye House, Olivier’s picturesque Wiltshire home. There
is Diana Cooper, Diana Mitford, Ottoline Morrell, Edith Sitwell, Winston
Churchill. Most prominently, there is Siegfried Sassoon (who has a lengthy
affair with Tennant) and Cecil Beaton. If we know Olivier now, it’s because we
recognise her from Beaton’s photographs, casually louche on the lawn with a
cigarette in her hand or posed as a stately Elizabeth I at one of their many
elaborate fancy-dress parties. Like Whistler, Beaton came to rely on Olivier
for artistic and emotional advice. “I really adore her and love her more than
almost any friend I have,” he wrote in 1931, with only mild hyperbole.

But most of all, the interest – even the suspense – of
Thomasson’s account comes from the central relationship itself. Both Whistler
and Olivier were virgins when they met. More interested in love than sex, they
were dreamers who encouraged each other’s taste for elaborate fantasies.

As their friendship became more romantic, a language of
courtly love developed. This could be flirtatious: “Seeing you against that
pink pillow in bed the other day,” Whistler informed Edith, “I feel I must, in
honesty, raise your marks for seduction from five to at least eight!” They enjoyed
the frisson of physical intimacy. Sharing a suite of rooms with Whistler at a
house party, Olivier noted in her diary that her bath was “really in his
bedroom, but we are so easy with each other that this seems all right ”.
Another time, she described dancing with him at a fancy-dress party where he
removed his wig and danced with “his own shapely head” on view. “His beauty
unbelievable ... it was a dream ... it must remain a dazzling memory.”

It would be easy to dismiss them both as sublimating sexual
desire: her for him, and him for the often overtly homosexual young men he
gathered around him. Thomasson doesn’t forget the importance of sex for both of
them, but she is also alert to the possibility of other kinds of intensity. In
the process, she portrays an emotional climate subtler than our own; certainly
one in which friendships were more intense than they commonly are now, perhaps
because people were more accustomed to repressing sexual inclinations.

In the first decade of their friendship, both Whistler and
Olivier seem to have been content to live celibate lives, fulfilled by the
creative and loving closeness of their friendship. This had its costs. For her,
it could be exhausting keeping up the high spirits and jet-black hair of her
youth, and socially awkward spending so much time with a coterie of younger
men. It’s not surprising that she avoided either thinking about or meeting
Whistler’s mother. She was uneasily aware of the indignity of an evening spent
cavorting in Soho with Whistler and Beaton, pretending that she was drunk.

There was also the more painful cost of loving a man whom
she knew to be only on loan to her. This is pain that animates her first novel,
The Love-child, which tells the story of a lonely spinster who brings into
being an imaginary child called Clarissa, “the creation of the love of all her
being”, only to murder her accidentally, casting Clarissa from her mind after
she falls in love with a man. Thomasson’s reading of the novel is subtle and
convincing. She portrays Olivier as using her writing to live through the
betrayal that she, more than Whistler, knows must ensue.

The drama, cleverly marshalled, of Thomasson’s account,
comes from Olivier’s fear that Whistler will leave her, that mere friendship,
however intense, leaves you without claims. The curiousness of the relationship
leaves the reader eager to know what will transpire. And Thomasson is an
excellent guide, ready to answer the most difficult questions, but reluctant to
judge or to simplify.

In the end, sex does intrude. Whistler is almost seduced by
an older man and then falls in love with one impossibly unattainable beautiful
and aristocratic girl after another, eventually losing his virginity aged 29.
But it is war that irrevocably separates them, leading Whistler to the French
battlefield, where he writes to Olivier hoping for “the great joy” of seeing
her again. His death a few days later leaves their love intact, enabling her to
dream of his ringing the doorbell and embracing her “with great love” before
she dies of grief, unable to face “this long lonely life without him”.

• Lara Feigel is the author of The Love-charm of Bombs:
Restless Lives in the Second World War.

1 comment:

Well, Jeeves, the explanation that Ms. Olivier was a writer would certainly explain those random papers scattered behind her in the Whistler portrait, wouldn't they? And here I had always assumed they must be preliminary drafts of her official proclamations as Mayor, since this portrait was painted during her term in office. I guess you learn something every day. Magnaverde.